Farmers could face water limits

Long-term goals for the source of nearly all the region's agribusiness could lead to limits on how much water producers across the region may draw for crops.

Plans approved Thursday to preserve over the next 50 years half of the water available today beneath a 14-county area surrounding Lubbock won't change anything this growing season.

But within a year, locally-elected water regulators said, the region will discuss limiting how much water irrigated agriculture worth billions of dollars may pump from the Ogallala Aquifer.

"Well-production limits are an option," said Jim Conkwright, manager of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District.

The move could mark the latest concession to keep conservation of a massive, waning resource meted out by local hands, which traces its roots back decades to the formation of the state's first efforts by landowners to influence how the Ogallala Aquifer was preserved.

Wary grower groups and the landowners who will ultimately approve any rules looked to start the process in earnest some months after finishing this year's harvest.

"We're just concerned," said David Gibson, executive director of the Texas Corn Producers Association. "We don't want any large shocks to the economy, the landowners and the producers. I think even the water districts are concerned about that as well, to make sure it's done in a manner that doesn't negatively impact the area's economy in a way that could be done differently."

Landowners in 13 counties formed the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 1 in 1951, not long after legislators came close to putting groundwater under state authority.

Their voices carried further on the plains than in the capitol, many figured, and beat regulators to the punch by forming their own. Even 60 years later, worries over how someone hundreds of miles away might tinker with a landowner's ability to draw from the aquifer has encouraged landowners in Hockley, Lamb, Swisher and Randall Counties to ask to join the district.

Livelihoods were at stake. Access to the Ogallala, the massive belt of water stretching all the way up to South Dakota, determined crop choices and land payments in the Texas Panhandle.

Rusty Lawson, a farmland broker and appraiser with Chas S. Middleton & Son, said it was simple math for farmers from his childhood in Lynn County.

Farmers there depended on rainfall without access to water, he said.

"Back then they would say a farmer would make a crop one out of every six years," Lawson said.

Irrigated farmers not ravaged by hail or some other disaster could count on bringing a cash crop to harvest every year.

New, genetically modified crops might have pushed it to one every three years for today's dryland farmers, he said. Farmers still paid a premium for the consistency of irrigation.

Land with access to the minimum amount of water needed to support 100 acres of irrigated agriculture costs about double what an owner would pay land that depends on rainfall to make a crop, Lawson said.

Rent for irrigated land could run four times the cost of dryland, he said.

Farmers over the decades refined their use of the withering resource through new technologies and smarter practices.

Growers freckled the countryside with green circles surrounding pivoting irrigation systems, instead of flooding rows with water bound to evaporate away, and filled the land with specially-bred, drought-toughened crops.

But where farmers could pump from under the region, they have. Parmer, Castro and Hale Counties have had among the steepest draw-downs of the eight states above the aquifer, based on United States Geological Survey data, to nourish corn, cotton and other crops.

Because the water in Texas sits deep beneath sediment, slowing rainfall's trickle into the aquifer, very little of it seems to replenish.

The landowner-run High Plains District has for years limited the number of pumps drawing from the aquifer by requiring set amounts of space between each well.

That could change to meet a goal approved Thursday to preserve half of the water available under the region today for growers 50 years from now.

Board president Robert Meyer, of Canyon, said the goal would likely mean pumping limits throughout the region.

"I think so," Meyer said. "I would say so."

The district could first focus on high use areas - Parmer, Castro, Hale - and would probably ease into any restrictions, said Bill Mullican, district consultant and former Texas Water Development Board deputy administrator.

"Obviously, they're going to do it in a way that does not result in some economic hardship or harm to the, especially, agricultural community, since about 95 percent of the water that's produced is for agriculture," Mullican said. "This isn't a gotcha thing."

High Plains would not be the first in the Panhandle to go to pumping limits. Requirements approved in the far north Panhandle to add meters to wells and restrict pumping amended last year had worried corn growers at first, Gibson said.

But the process made many realize they did not use as much water as they thought, he said.

Any proposal would still take winning over in the Lubbock region, he said.

"We've got a real challenge to balance out how we deal with that where they've still got the water," Gibson said. "We've got to figure out a way to keep that guy in business and pay his bank note off."

To comment on this story:

elliott.blackburn@lubbockonline.com • 766-8722

james.ricketts@lubbockonline.com • 766-8706

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